I use my left foot for the brake when I drive an automatic shift car. Nothing wrong with it at all, and you can gain a fraction of a second in braking response time. And no, I don't ride the brake normally, I am not an idiot.

"My father used his right foot for the accelerator and his left for the brake. It was fairly common in his day."

Might be common, but it's a really bad idea. The worst example of this is people who actually keep their left foot on the brake pedal, while driving. This risks dragging the brakes while you're driving, which will overheat the brake fluid, aside from wasting energy, brake linings, overheating and probably warping rotors, and keeping the brakes lights on so drivers behind you can't figure out what you're doing (added as the last bad effet, because it is the least destructive).

I think that treating the simultaneous application of brakes and throttle as an error condition is a great idea, myself, and it is consistent with the way cruise control works as well. Plus, it would cure drivers of that bad habit in a hurry!

As the resident test & measurement editor, I must ask, how do we know what caused the flipped bit? Was it caused by a glitch resulting from noise? Was it purely software initated? Is the condition repeatable enough to determine the root cause?

"No-one (sensible) will need to use acellerator and brake at the same time during highway driving, and it's normally expected that the same foot is used for both, and by design they are not suppoed to be used together."

My father used his right foot for the accelerator and his left for the brake. It was fairly common in his day.

Unless you design a totally benign product you should expect your code to be examined by an expert witness as a matter of certainty -- Ford and Chevy do not get to see all the code usually -- Just the expert witnesses for the prosicution and defense -- This was how $80 per share Honeywell stock of mine became $16 per share after a 757 related verdict came out that the design should not have required manual flipping of the Nav database data from one bank of memory to another by the pilot when crossing a certain line on the globe ----- In the case it was shown that other compiler vendors had the technology to automatically do this bank switching automaticaly --

@Antony Anderson: Thanks for sharing the link! I am from the industrial automation domain and I have been seeing a direct influence of the customers asking for complaince to IEC 61508 more than the regulatory authorities, which eventually has made the regulatory authorities in US, EU to make it mandatory for industrial safety critical systems. Unfortunately, in the automotive space, technology is advancing in a fast pace (electronics being used more and more) in comparison to the pace at which standards are upgraded, regulatory bodies bringing the necessary requirements/norms in, making it mandatory for the automobile industry to get their systems certified by the independent assesors such as TUV / Exida.

I don't understand how the obvious seems to be missing. No electronics can ever be 100% fail-safe because there will always be failures either in code or hardware. We know that, and it shouldn't be difficult to provide an external mechanism that will return the accelerator to idle if the brake pedal is used.

No-one (sensible) will need to use acellerator and brake at the same time during highway driving, and it's normally expected that the same foot is used for both, and by design they are not suppoed to be used together.

An external or separate micro-controller can easily sense that road speed is above a preset threshold, engine revs likewise, and the brake is applied. This can then be used as an override that forces the throttle back to idle, disconnecting the ECU if needs be.

This arrangement could quite easily still allow 'heel-and-toe' operation for hill starts with a manual transmission (does anyone still do that?). At the same time, simple sensing would activate the separate micro if any of the defined criteria were met.

So, if road speed and/or engine revs are above preset limits, the throttle is open (or open beyond a 'reasonable' limit) and the brake is applied, the micro takes over and returns the throttle to idle or kills the engine completely. Normal human reaction is all that's needed to get the car under control.

Normal driving is unlikely to trigger the event because most people only have one right foot. Is this idea too simple?

Bert22306 I think that your thoughts might be centering in the right area. Your valve controller analogy is probably a fairly good functional fit to the electronic throttle control, except that I would imagine that a valve controller drives the valve both open and closed whereas my understanding is that in toyota's case the PWM driver for the H bridge motor is driven open and it is spring pressure that closes the throttle valve until the limp home position is reached, after which the H bridge reverses and drives the throttle to the fully closed position.

There is an interesting redacted statement in Appendix A of the NASA report which reads:

"A.11.3.4.8 Duty-Cycle Conversion The duty cycle conversion modifies scales the command based on the battery voltage and converts the signal to a duty cycle percentage. The duty cycle conversion operates at a rate of 16 ms"

So the H bridge controlling the motor voltage, instead of working from a constant voltage supply, as I think would normally be the case, switches the DC supply voltage, which of course is far from constant, and the duty cycle is adjusted by the ECU to compensate for changes in the supply voltage. My personal view is that Toyota would have been well advised to regulate the voltage to the PWM with a standard voltage regulator and not try to combine the regulating function with the ECU software function controlling the throttle angle. It must surely add unnecessarily to the computing load on the ECU. Functionally the two configurations are effectively the same, but practically are very different.

The person who has done a lot of work on the implications of the duty cycle conversion is Dr Ron Belt who has written up several technical memos for circulation which you and others might find interesting as a stimulus to your own thinking. If you Google "Belt Hypothesis Toyota" you will find two memos on the subject which are hosted on my website.

Now there is another aspect to the toyota throttle mechanism itself that may be relevant and that is if you plot DC motor current against throttle angle you get a very wide hysteresis loop so that the current has to be greatly reduced before you get any reduction in throttle angle. This stiction is not mechanical stiction and appears to depend on the motor armature current.

Now this is with DC excitation and it might be different with a 500 HZ pulsed DC voltage from the PWM because you might expect to get a certain amount of jitter which might overcome the stiction. What is notable about this "stiction" is that it is much greater than the normal mechanical stiction. I have yet to take a motor to pieces and check the design, but a possible explanation is electromagnetic cogging torque. This could be very dependent on manufacturing tolerances if the airgap is small.

So in reality I suspect that we may be seeing a combination of a whole variety of factors including electromagnetic design of the motor, the gearing, the design of the PWM the means for compensating for changes in battery voltage, timing errors, the software,not to mention electrical contact intermittencies, all of which very occasionally might combine together to cause the throttle to move to the wide open position and remain there but which under other circumstances might, for example, result in a sudden uncommanded deceleration. It will be interesting to see what comes out from under the Toyota all-weather floormat as a result of the Bookout case within the next few weeks.